A Student’s View of the Library – Part I

October 27, 2016

As a marketing student at Saint Joseph’s, I was extremely excited to finally work on my very first marketing project as a college student. The assignment on market segmentation intrigued me, and I was eager to begin making the best project I could manage. However my group quickly discovered that brainstorming ideas and finding quality information that would be representative of these ideas are two totally different things. Thankfully, I soon realized that me and my group members weren’t alone in this; we had the library! The library has helped us tremendously when it came to completing our project. Thus, I wanted to share my experience by blogging about it. This post is one of two, and the second post will be posted shortly after this one.

Starting our research:

The first thing we had to do for our project was create an annotated bibliography in APA format. Therefore, we had to do research and find information on our assigned segment. Even though I did my research from the comfort of my dorm, I was still able to use library resources. When I searched for ‘Millennials’ on Google Scholar, I was (pleasantly) surprised to discover that I could access many of the search results through the library. In Google Scholar, if SJU has a full-text version of a source, the SJU link will appear next to the search result link. [Instructions and video for Google Scholar]

SJU full text links from Google Scholar

I also found the library databases to be very helpful in finding scholarly research. My group relied heavily on the information we found on our segment from EbscoHost. The library has multiple databases from EBSCO to choose from. For this project, my group chose to use Academic Search Premier and Business Source Complete to find information. In particular, I like the fact that you can customize your search on EbscoHost by using multiple keywords. For instance, to find information on how Millennials behave, I searched for keywords “Millennials” and “habits.” Moreover, EbscoHost allows you to narrow your search results to help you find the most accurate and up-to-date information. You can narrow down searches by dates, topics, and what type of format you would like the article to be in (pdf, HTML full-text, etc.).

Citation Help:

Like other college students, I am accustomed to using MLA format to cite all my sources. However, in many business classes at Saint Joseph’s, APA format is required. Therefore, I turned to the library for help with my citations. I was able to receive help when creating an annotated bibliography for this project. To get help, I simply went to the “research help” section at the front desk on the old side of the library. There, I found several librarians and research librarians who were very helpful (and friendly). Many individuals at the library are willing to help students properly cite their information (in fact, these (over-excited) individuals encourage students to ask for help with citations). I now have a better understanding of how to cite in APA format because of the help I received in the library.
Without the use of the library resources, me and my group would have had an extremely hard time finding appropriate articles and information on our segment. In addition to the information we found from quality websites, we heavily relied on the library for our research, and using the library tools helped us to find all the necessary information we needed to create a high-quality project!

Stay tuned:

Stay tuned for part 2 of this post to find out how we used library resources to make a video for our project!